"Scumlord"

[SueDonim]

Look the bloke has had judgements against him in the tenancy tribunal and is subject to an investigation by MBIE.

you can call it a conspiracy against landlords if you like, but I think everyone else can see these particular circumstances are well past the point where Stuff needs to provide evidence and everyone else needs to do some critical analysis about perceived bias in the article. 
 
Enough red flags have obviously been raised to warrant an investigation into his practices - the system is working as it should

What you and others here are saying is that you believe what is in the article, even though I brought up doubts because I've seen Stuff's previous unbalanced reporting of this kind.

I got curious enough to see whether my gut mistrust of the article was right and did a bit of digging - all resources freely available on the internet. I think I was more right than wrong. Maybe the landlord is a smartarse or maybe he's just become the scapegoat. What was clear is that Stuff conveniently failed to mention that the tenant who was awarded the $2400 had a higher award made against her and had to pay the landlord the, albeit small, difference. If Stuff didn't know that then they failed the most basic fact checking so either way are responsible for the lack of balance. What else I found was other awards against some of the names in the article and very little against the landlord. To make a comparison, you don't call a driver a dangerous driver because they got a parking ticket. You shouldn't call a landlord a bad landlord/person because they have sometimes got things wrong.

For the Herald* article I linked to above, I also checked further on that and found that the landlord seems to have had a run of bad tenants and can quite understand that they might just be at the end of their tether. I don't necessarily think the Herald is great either (their claim to be the "best journalism" in their beg for subscriptions makes me cringe every time I see it) but they do provide a lot better balance than Stuff. And in this case the facts that I checked stacked up.

The "conspiracy against landlords" is only a part of left wing politics and was not what this was about. My point was always that some elements of the media can't be trusted and the Stuff article was an example of imbalance. Elsewhere on this forum threads have tried to push people away from fringe disinformation and lead them to evidence. This was another example.

The idea that tenants are always vulnerable and must be protected is entirely wrong. Some tenants, and some landlords, are vulnerable. Most are not. And most have good professional relationships with each other. Imbalanced articles on Stuff and anywhere else in the media don't do anyone any favours.

*ADDED. When I looked back a whole paragraph has disappeared from one of the replies above. The Herald article is https://www.nzherald.co.nz/northland-age...7YJCXG7BM/.